Does anyone out there believe that the current, overwhelmingly white opioid epidemic is due to racial genetic differences?

Earlier this month during a discussion on marijuana legislation, Kansas Representative Steve Alford applied similar logic to a parallel situation. He argued that a key reason for drug laws in the 20th century was that African-Americans “were basically users and they basically responded the worst off those drugs just because [of] their character makeup, their genetics, and that.”

In this reasoning, the Republican politician ignored the fact that rates of drug use and addiction are similar across races. He also ignored the real disparity: African-American drug users are almost three times more likely to be arrested for illegal drug use. His statement implies that these differences are a result of genomic susceptibility rather than racial inequality. Alford found his imagined black addict culpable at the level of DNA.

Alford was rightly skewered for espousing racist thinking, and he later apologized for his comment. But the view he had stated is not uncommon. In fact, the assumption that health disparities are caused by race rather than racism permeates more subtly in the practices of many organizations, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

In the most recent NIH Biennial Report to Congress, for example, the words “genomic,” “genome,” and “genetic” are used a total of 556 times. In comparison, other words such as “social determinants of health,” “discrimination,” “poverty,” “socioeconomic status,” “racism,” and “sexism” appeared a total of 15 times in the entirety of the report’s 441 pages. In the decade between 1994 and 2005, the NIH funded 22,000 studies investigating genomics, 1,300 of which discussed race, genes and disease. The number of grants awarded to research the connection between health, racism and racial discrimination? Only 44.

On the subjects of disease and disparity, the NIH focuses on the genetic code inside individual bodies and ignores the wider contexts within which these bodies live, work, play and get sick. The NIH overlooks societal inequalities and gives genes too much credit—just like Alford.

The patients I see in clinic illustrate the shortcoming of this thinking. In my third year of medical school, I met Khiara, a six-year-old African-American girl who adores science and strawberry-pink hairclips with equal ferocity. The first words she ever said to me were, “I can’t breathe.” Her acute asthma attack struck just months after Eric Garner gasped the same three words as he was dying from a police chokehold.

As a black child, Khiara’s risk of death from asthma hangs 10 times higher than a white girl her age. A child like her living in the South Bronx is 14.2 times as likely to be hospitalized for asthma-related complications as a child in a wealthier neighborhood less than two miles away. Despite her insistences, Khiara’s plumage of hair ornaments cannot protect her.

An overwhelming majority of the 2013 NIH Biennial Report’s section on asthma discusses biomarkers, immunotherapies and the development of the “African power chip,” a genome-sequencing endeavor meant to “discover genes associated with asthma in African ancestry populations.” The report ignores the fact that, as a result ofunjust housing policies and highway projects, black Americans have a significantly higher exposure rate to 13 out of 14 major pollutants, a majority of which are associated not only with asthma but also heart disease and cancer.

It also ignores that people of color are nearly twice as likely to live next to toxic waste facilities. More than half of the people who live in these residential areas—also referred to as “sacrifice zones”—are racial minorities. The distance between their homes and industrial plants that cough black smog and bleed hazardous chemicals is 1.8 miles—the same distance as seven rounds around a high school track.

Khiara is not uniquely susceptible to asthma because of her genetics. She is at risk because of a different kind of inheritance, one bestowed by the legacy of unrelenting racism embedded in American history. The NIH report’s emphasis on innate racial difference misses this larger picture. Genomic sequencing cannot solve, or even comprehend, asthma inequities. It can’t even come close.

In Alford’s home state of Kansas, 89 percent of fatal opioid overdose cases were white. It’s hard to imagine the NIH leaping to create a “white power chip” to examine links between European genomes and opioid addiction. Across the nation, the majority-white epidemic of opioid abuse is being treated as a public health issue—a storm whipped up by prescription practices, healthcare access and policy funding—instead of as evidence of genetic racial difference. Importantly, this understanding means the proposed solutions will be different as well: remedies will center around infrastructure—clinics and counseling—rather than genetic technology.

Misdiagnoses are dangerous because the accompanying treatments remain ineffective—or harmful—while the problem continues to grow. There is no denying that genes contribute to health; no one is advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But that’s the point: the issue of health disparities is so much bigger than a bathtub. The behemoth of American racial health inequalities leaves an excess of 100,000 black men, women and children dead every year. This suffering cannot be explained by genetic variance between races. It is a matter of external inequity, not innate difference—racism, rather than race.

It’s not about Alford. His sentiments are noxious, but the problem doesn’t start or end with him. Right now, the idea that health inequities are caused by genetic racial differences is the explanation of least resistance. This dogma is endemic to the U.S. healthcare system and it seriously limits our approach to health inequity.

Though there is wide acknowledgement that illness is caused by a number of things—genes, environment, social conditions and their interactions—the NIH investigates only a small slice of the equation. While kids like Khiara are running out of breath, the NIH continues to chase down theories of genetic difference instead of pausing to survey and study a field rife with segregation, supremacy and subprime health. We need to look beyond the barrel of the microscope. This one-track mindset is costly to communities that need open playgrounds and safe housing options rather than powders or pills.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jennifer Tsai

Jennifer Tsai is a fourth-year medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is currently on leave pursuing a Masters of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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